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Billy Bob Thornton says he returned to the football field featured in the 2004 film Friday Night Lights — and had a visceral reaction.
Speaking on a panel at the ATX TV Festival alongside his co-stars from the Paramount+ series Landman, Thornton discussed how much of the show is filmed in the oil boomtowns of West Texas.
“Last year we went to [the] Midland — Odessa area,” Thornton said. “So Friday Night Lights was 20 years ago, and I had spent a lot of time on the field, and I walked out on the field and I got chills.”
Thornton played high school football coach Gary Gaines in the 2004 film Friday Night Lights, directed by Peter Berg and also starring Tim McGraw, Amber Heard and Connie Britton. Inspired by Buzz Bissinger’s 1990 best-selling novel of the same name, the film won best sports movie at the 2005 ESPY Awards. The following year, Berg adapted the story into a series and cast Kyle Chandler in the now iconic role of Coach Eric Taylor, with Britton playing his wife, Tami Taylor.
On Dec. 11, Peacock announced that an adaptation of the Emmy award-winning football series was officially in development.
In his current project Landman, Thornton plays an oilman named Tommy Norris who is always looking out for his daughter Ainsley (played by Michelle Randolph).
While much of Landman is filmed in and around Fort Worth, Texas, Thornton said filming in Odessa — where he shot the 2004 film — was “a really great moment.”
“It’s a real special area, it’s a wonderful place to be because of the people out there,” Thornton said, adding that the Landman cast and crew “hope to make people aware of Texas and what it really is and how good the people are down here.”
He continued: “These days in the climate we are in, people hear you are working in Texas and people think you are going to get shot down there. I told my daughter, ‘It’s like being in LA but you just see more cowboy hats.’ ”
Elsewhere in the panel, Thornton noted that filming Landman in Texas is integral to the authenticity of the show.
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“There is something you have to consider when you are doing a movie project,” he said. “It’s not always the land, the other thing is they don’t consider the background actors. If you did it in Vancouver or Santa Fe, you would not get the look with the background actors, and that is very important that they carry themselves as Texans.”
In other words, he added elsewhere on the panel: “We don’t have to go to other countries to get people to play cowboys.”
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Asked whether he was anything like his character Tommy Norris in the show, Thornton said, “If I were a landman, I’d be about like that. You have to put yourself into it. And I don’t take things that are not right for me. It’s just an instinct, if I think I am the best guy for it, I will take it if I like it.”
Unlike Norris, however, Thornton said he is a little more laid-back, though his own voice was very much the inspiration for the character, as written by series creator Taylor Sheridan.
“[Unlike Tommy Norris] I’m more like, I just rolled out of bed….which is usually the case….smoking behind the dumpster,” Thornton joked. “When I first saw the script, I saw that he had written it in my voice, but then he put himself into it as well. Taylor said, ‘I wrote this in your voice’ … it makes it easy to go to work.”
